Pseudoscience is just what the word implies – false science. Pseudoscience has a long and storied history as an uneasy and often unwelcome companion to traditional science. Sometimes the line between “real” and pseudoscience can be difficult to distinguish.
Examples of Pseudoscience
Many pseudosciences are fairly easy to identify, at least if one is not a practitioner. Hollow-Earth Cosmology, a premise suggested in the 17th century, claiming that the earth consisted of two concentric hollow shells, is pretty easy to dismiss in the 21st century. Phrenology, the idea that personality can be determined from skull shape, was actually considered a science in the 1800s, and influenced early neuroscience studies, but few will argue its relegation to the realm of pseudoscience today. Reflexology, the practice of applying pressure to different parts of the hands or feet to evoke some sort of physiological health improvement, is another less than solid "science."
Homeopathy, however, can be more difficult to discount, in some cases, and even the Food and Drug Administration now features a Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) on its website that evaluates alternative health claims, some quite favorably. With an abundance of email and social networking sites speeding claims for everything from cancer cures to get rich quick schemes at the click of a mouse, it’s important to have a good “baloney detection kit.”
The Baloney Detection Kit
The late scientist and author, Carl Sagan, introduced the idea of a “baloney detection kit” in his book, The Demon Haunted Word (Random House, New York. 1996]. To be employed “as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration,” Sagan's baloney detection kit is stocked with tools for skeptical thinking.
Sagan defined skeptical thinking as “the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and – especially important – to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument.” Among Sagan’s recommended tools in the baloney detection kit:
- Look for independent confirmation of the facts.
- Encourage substantive debate by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
- Suspect any “Arguments from authority”, since, in science, there may be experts but there are no "authorities"
- Don’t become overly attached to a hypothesis for personal reasons; look at different hypothesis and test them to systematically disprove all alternatives to see what remains
- Quantify, to see if what is being explained has some numerical quantity attached to it
- If there is a chain of argument supporting an idea, “every link in the chain must work… not just most of them.”
- Remember "Occam's razor" - if there are two hypotheses that explain something equally well, choose the simplest one.
- See if a hypothesis can be repeatedly tested and render the same result each time.
Ten Questions for Evaluating Science Claims
Michael Shermer ["The Baloney Detection Kit", The Work of Michael Shermer) , author and founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, expanded on Sagan’s baloney detection kit and came up with ten basic questions to ask when confronted by any claim:
- How reliable is the claim?
- How often does this source make the same or similar claims?
- Have the claims been verified by an independent, unaffiliated source?
- Does the claim fit what is known of how the world works?
- Has anyone tried to disprove the claim or is only supporting evidence available?
- Does the majority of evidence, from all sources, point to the claimant’s conclusion or to a different one?
- Is the claimant employing accepted rules of reason and tools of research?
- Is the claimant providing a reasoned explanation for the observed phenomena or just denying the existence of others or of an existing explanation?
- If the claimant is offering a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as an existing explanation did?
- Do the claimant’s personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusion?
The long and the short of it is that with so many claims for so many things coming from so many different directions, it is more important than ever to be able to hold claims up to the light of skeptical thinking, and employ the tools of a good quality “baloney detection kit” to honestly assess the truth of any matter.
Theresa Willingham - My goal, as a writer and photographer, is to create thought provoking and informative content that inspires community engagement, and ...
